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This Sacred Life
In a time of climate change, environmental degradation, and social injustice, the question of the value and purpose of human life has become urgent. What are the grounds for hope in a wounded world? This Sacred Life gives a deep philosophical and religious articulation of humanity's identity and vocation by rooting people in a symbiotic, meshwork world that is saturated with sacred gifts. The benefits of artificial intelligence and genetic enhancement notwithstanding, Norman Wirzba shows how an account of humans as interdependent and vulnerable creatures orients people to be a creative, healing presence in a world punctuated by wounds. He argues that the commodification of places and creatures needs to be resisted so that all life can be cherished and celebrated. Humanity's fundamental vocation is to bear witness to God's love for creaturely life, and to commit to the construction of a hospitable and beautiful world.
286 pages, Paperback
Published October 14, 2021
26 people are currently reading
271 people want to read
About the author
Norman Wirzba
32 books92 followersNorman Wirzba is Professor of Theology and Ecology at Duke University Divinity School and a pioneer of scholarly work on religion, philosophy, ecology, and agrarianism. He is also the author of Food and Faith, Living the Sabbath, The Paradise of God, and From Nature to Creation. He lives near Hillsborough, North Carolina.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
April 17, 2023
Glad to get a second read alongside Dr. Wirzba's lectures. Great analysis of recovering the foundations of humans as creatures in creation. I appreciated the interdisciplinary conversation going on in this, complete with economic critiques, art involvement, and infrastructure creativity to amplify creatureliness.
August 18, 2022
Absolutely outstanding. A deeply formative book.
December 23, 2024
One of my favorite books of the year, an intersection of so many things that interest me or are important to me. Reading Willie James Jennings a few years ago helped me see the unmooredness of whiteness, and hunger for a deeper sense of rootedness and connection to place--Wirzba cites some Jennings in this book, and in fact, Jennings endorsed the book:
"This beautifully rendered account of the sacrality of life offers what so many writing today on ecology, ecotheology, or environmental ethics struggle to achieve - a coherent and compelling vision of the human creature. This is a book that sings!"
Reading Robin Wall Kimmerer this year gave me a sense of the wonder and magic of the created world, and this book has a flavor of that, in a Christian key, indeed, NW cites Kimmerer at a few places in this book.
A significant study for my in seminary was when I did a deep dive into the Hebrew word "ebed" which means "to work, to serve" and what it means to be human in light of that, and in connection with the land. This book explores some of that same ground and I found rich resonances with my own thinking.
And finally, 2024 was the year I spent hours and hours and days and days in the garden, completely restructuring the massive compost pile; planting native pollinators; tilling, planting, weeding, thinning, harvesting and sharing the many gifts that this little plot of land so generously gave. This Sacred Life read at times like "a theology of gardening," and in fact, this was one of the explicit exhortations in the book--go and plant something in the dirt, get connected to the land--and so I would gladly put this book down and put go back out and put my hands in the dirt, pull some invasive non-native plants, tend to the plants, watch the bumblebees, smell the asters, look at the birds.
This was the year that I need This Sacred Life, I guess. What a year it has been.
"This beautifully rendered account of the sacrality of life offers what so many writing today on ecology, ecotheology, or environmental ethics struggle to achieve - a coherent and compelling vision of the human creature. This is a book that sings!"
Reading Robin Wall Kimmerer this year gave me a sense of the wonder and magic of the created world, and this book has a flavor of that, in a Christian key, indeed, NW cites Kimmerer at a few places in this book.
A significant study for my in seminary was when I did a deep dive into the Hebrew word "ebed" which means "to work, to serve" and what it means to be human in light of that, and in connection with the land. This book explores some of that same ground and I found rich resonances with my own thinking.
And finally, 2024 was the year I spent hours and hours and days and days in the garden, completely restructuring the massive compost pile; planting native pollinators; tilling, planting, weeding, thinning, harvesting and sharing the many gifts that this little plot of land so generously gave. This Sacred Life read at times like "a theology of gardening," and in fact, this was one of the explicit exhortations in the book--go and plant something in the dirt, get connected to the land--and so I would gladly put this book down and put go back out and put my hands in the dirt, pull some invasive non-native plants, tend to the plants, watch the bumblebees, smell the asters, look at the birds.
This was the year that I need This Sacred Life, I guess. What a year it has been.
December 18, 2024
I finally finished this book! It felt like a slog at times because it is DENSE! Wirzba draws from a staggering number of texts and authors to form his argument: that this world is a gift from God, that all of life is sacred, and that it is our fundamental task as humans to participate in/respond to the world in ways that bring more life and more flourishing for all of creation.
This book really reminded me of why I dislike studying philosophy. 😅 Too many words! I think it makes the book bogged down and unapproachable for the everyday reader. But I appreciated the discussion around transhumanism, and the introduction of the concept of a “meshwork world”. I wished that he would have drawn on Indigenous authors other than Kimmerer for this chapter though. Definitely a missed opportunity there.
The last chapter titled Called to Creativity was my favourite. I think Wirzba’s discussion of the nature of work and creativity is excellent. I appreciated that he got very practical at the end and gave five philosophical and theological principals that can help guide us towards cultivating creative lives.
“People, in other words, do not exist apart from their places but grow out of them. They are not self-standing or self-originating agents, which is why an account of creativity as self-expression is inadequate. Their lives are symbiogenetic, always co-becoming with others, which means that their doing and their agency are also an undergoing in which they respond to a dynamic, given world that is working itself out on and in them.” p.227
This book really reminded me of why I dislike studying philosophy. 😅 Too many words! I think it makes the book bogged down and unapproachable for the everyday reader. But I appreciated the discussion around transhumanism, and the introduction of the concept of a “meshwork world”. I wished that he would have drawn on Indigenous authors other than Kimmerer for this chapter though. Definitely a missed opportunity there.
The last chapter titled Called to Creativity was my favourite. I think Wirzba’s discussion of the nature of work and creativity is excellent. I appreciated that he got very practical at the end and gave five philosophical and theological principals that can help guide us towards cultivating creative lives.
“People, in other words, do not exist apart from their places but grow out of them. They are not self-standing or self-originating agents, which is why an account of creativity as self-expression is inadequate. Their lives are symbiogenetic, always co-becoming with others, which means that their doing and their agency are also an undergoing in which they respond to a dynamic, given world that is working itself out on and in them.” p.227
December 6, 2025
fangirl energy. yes, you should read this. repetitive at times, but overall beautifully written. one of my favorite aspects of this book is the way wirzba uses a variety of voices as sources of theological wisdom about who we are as creatures
April 20, 2023
In This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World, Norman Wirzba addresses the harrowing challenges of the Anthropocene by inviting readers to return to their creaturely roots. In an approach that is profoundly formational, he suggests that the devastating causes and doomed pseudo-solutions to our ecological crisis share in a willful forgetfulness of our identity as creatures created by God and inextricably entangled within a sacred world. Until we can reclaim these fundamental realities, we will not be able to live accordingly. After exposing the grim past and grimmer prospective future held captive by our reigning neoliberal logic, Wirzba offers a set of generative alternative frameworks for understanding the world and humanity’s place intimately intertwined within it. This ultimately gives rise to a theological anthropology that emphasizes our creaturely nature and a hope that rediscovering this innate truth about ourselves can propel us towards an overflowing love for our fellow creatures of the world.
Wirzba begins This Sacred Life with two chapters that speak to a past, present, and future that operate in contradiction to the vision he will go on to articulate, helping readers to appreciate its relevance within our wounded world. The first is a bracing articulation of the Anthropocene, our current geological era in which “the effects of human power, formerly limited to specific regions and particular communities of people, have now become planetary in their reach, unequal in their distribution, and impossible to hide or ignore” (18). Per his assessment, it could just as fittingly be referred to as the “Capitolocene,” as evidenced by the catastrophic compounding impact that the relentlessly exploitative and extractive logic of capitalism has had on the earth and humanity’s relationship to it (10). Further, given neoliberalism’s idolatrous regard for the illusion of individual freedom, we have been enculturated to disregard the notion of global solidarity and collective action that the escalating crisis demands (22). In the following chapter, Wirzba considers ways that people have attempted to respond to the looming threat of climate change –– as well as the inherent frailty of embodied existence more generally–– through fantasies of cyborg-transhumanism or the colonization of other planets (44). However he argues that these strategies, along with capitalist myths of individualism and limitlessness, are bound to fail because they are grounded in denials of reality’s most fundamental truths that the world is sacred and that we are creatures whose lives are unavoidably vulnerable and entangled within it.
From there, Wirzba turns his focus to expanding on these corrective fundamentals, beginning with his argument that “humanity is soil-birthed and soil-bound” (65). Though this begins as a reference to the Genesis creation narrative, he also means it quite literally. Not only do we draw our necessary nutrients from the soil and return to it after dying, but researchers of microbiomes have found that each of us is partially made up of millions of the same microbes that are found in soil, suggesting a depth of entanglement that contradicts all notions of atomistic existence (73). Rather than a Darwinian framework of competition, this implies a reality of “symbiogenesis” that places cooperation and “co-becoming” at the heart of organic life (73). Wirzba writes: “Human life is always life together with other creatures, large and small,” continuing on to say that “To live a symbiotic life is to understand that our being is always a becoming characterized by receiving and giving, touching and being touched, eating and being eaten, and influencing and being influenced” (76). He suggests that plants are perhaps our best teachers of this, modeling the “fruit-bearing and flowering” benefits of an existence that embraces rootedness over mobility and leans into the essential communal dimensions of interrelated life (76).
Having established the profound entanglement of organic existence, Wirzba next introduces the idea of harmonia mundi, the symphonic “song of life itself” that arises when creation acts in accordance with its unitive purpose (95). He accompanies this with Timothy Ingold’s concept of “meshwork,” an alternative to the network framework that instead insists that “things are their relations. They have no existence, no life, and no meaning apart from the relations that entangle them in a bewildering array of lines of codevelopment” (119). How, then, do these overlapping ideas of symbiogenesis, rootedness, harmonia mundi, and meshwork relate to the crises of the Anthropocene? Wirzba implies that they illuminate the underpinnings of life itself, countering the siren songs of rugged individualism, self-serving competition, and escapism into new planets or inorganic, atomistic techno-bodies that are peddled as the reigning solutions to the dire challenges we face. He writes: “Life alone is a contradiction in terms. Every life moves within a dynamic meshwork world in which an unfathomable number and variety of other lives constantly intersect. To be alive is to be engaged in processes of social and ecological becoming that entangle us within the becoming of others” (177).
In the final section of This Sacred Life, Wirzba arrives at his central premise of articulating the world as God’s sacred creation occupied by creatures like ourselves who are called to contribute to its collective flourishing. He cedes that if this were not true, and we in fact did live within the immanent frame with no transcendent intention in our creation, then all his previous points could be considered happenstance at best and easily ignored in favor of any other individualized perspective of purpose, with the reigning view belonging to capitalism’s mechanistic, utilitarian evaluation (126-127). Wirzba characterizes this as modernity’s worldview, “marked by disenchantment and desacralization, such that things are experienced as fragments and as without lasting value, meaning, or purpose apart from the mastering subject that controls them” (94). To hold to an ethical alternative that affirms a generative intention is, he argues, only possible via a transcendent source who has created the world and imbued it with its sanctity and purpose (158).
Wirzba is cognizant of monotheistic religion’s damning history in regards to matters of ecology and embodiment, citing inclinations towards anti-materialism, dominating postures of subjugation, and otherworldly escapism –– but he asks readers to consider those as aberrations that he hopes to amend (156). He connects the concept of creatio ex nihil to “creatio ex amore,” suggesting that God created the cosmos out of nothing and therefore was motivated not by need but by gracious, creative love (165). The implication, then, is that “Every creature, simply by being the creature that it is, is a material embodiment of a divine intention and energy that rejoices in its flourishing” (166). Ultimately, this is what gives rise to the conviction of life as sacred and the myriad of ethical implications that that carries. Wirzba writes: “If one affirms God as the creator of life, one must also affirm the created beings that God daily nurtures and sustains. One cannot claim to love God if one does not also love what God loves” (154). In other words, God tends to every created being that they graciously manifest, and in doing so grants it the dignity and worth of sanctity through their loving investment.
In this way, we might also think of each experience of life as an expression of divine gifting. This, of course, renders humanity as creatures reliant upon the gifts of God and the nurturing sustenance of the world we belong to, which is a more precarious identity than we often like to claim. Wirzba affirms that “Limit remains at the core of a human being’s existence, and communicates that people are constituted as finite and needy, and will remain so throughout their living. They do not create their own life, nor can they sustain it from out of themselves. Instead, they must constantly look beyond themselves to fellow creatures, the garden itself, and ultimately to [God]” (191). However, he also attests to a generative quality to this life of entangled receptivity, inspiring gratitude, generosity, and hospitality amongst those who can appreciate the gift of their sacred existence. This, ultimately, is the kenotic model of living granted to us by Jesus. Wirzba writes that “Jesus is asking people to reconceive themselves as open vessels that gratefully receive God’s gifts and generously share them with others. They are to reorient themselves in the world as embodied sites through which God’s hospitality with creatures takes place” (206).
Some readers may find fault with This Sacred Life’s hyper-local proposed solutions of to the challenges of the Anthropocene, but Wirzba’s formational emphasis is just as easily considered an asset. He correctly acknowledges that the vast majority of harm is perpetuated by a small number of capitalists, but rather than seeing this as cause for resignation he recognizes the need for a formational overhaul. The logic of neoliberalism has distorted much of our public imagination about who we are, the world we live in and how we are to live within it, to the point where we feel inclined to turn to the same worldviews that caused the problem in hopes that they can help us fix them. Wirzba argues against this, urging the importance of re-enchantment that attends to the sanctity of the world and its interconnected inhabitants as creatures created and continually sustained by God’s loving care. This, he argues, is the counternarrative we need to (re)claim in order to connect with the intended purposes of life that have been woven into the fabric of our entangled existence. The invitation is, quite simply, to begin to live responsively to the gracious gift of life with generative postures of self-giving generosity, tenderness, interrelatedness, and care that are so lacking within our increasingly isolated, individualistic, and competitive contexts. Despite the lingering fear that this may be insufficient, This Sacred Life still reads as a wellspring of hope, compelling readers to remember the sanctity of existence.
Wirzba begins This Sacred Life with two chapters that speak to a past, present, and future that operate in contradiction to the vision he will go on to articulate, helping readers to appreciate its relevance within our wounded world. The first is a bracing articulation of the Anthropocene, our current geological era in which “the effects of human power, formerly limited to specific regions and particular communities of people, have now become planetary in their reach, unequal in their distribution, and impossible to hide or ignore” (18). Per his assessment, it could just as fittingly be referred to as the “Capitolocene,” as evidenced by the catastrophic compounding impact that the relentlessly exploitative and extractive logic of capitalism has had on the earth and humanity’s relationship to it (10). Further, given neoliberalism’s idolatrous regard for the illusion of individual freedom, we have been enculturated to disregard the notion of global solidarity and collective action that the escalating crisis demands (22). In the following chapter, Wirzba considers ways that people have attempted to respond to the looming threat of climate change –– as well as the inherent frailty of embodied existence more generally–– through fantasies of cyborg-transhumanism or the colonization of other planets (44). However he argues that these strategies, along with capitalist myths of individualism and limitlessness, are bound to fail because they are grounded in denials of reality’s most fundamental truths that the world is sacred and that we are creatures whose lives are unavoidably vulnerable and entangled within it.
From there, Wirzba turns his focus to expanding on these corrective fundamentals, beginning with his argument that “humanity is soil-birthed and soil-bound” (65). Though this begins as a reference to the Genesis creation narrative, he also means it quite literally. Not only do we draw our necessary nutrients from the soil and return to it after dying, but researchers of microbiomes have found that each of us is partially made up of millions of the same microbes that are found in soil, suggesting a depth of entanglement that contradicts all notions of atomistic existence (73). Rather than a Darwinian framework of competition, this implies a reality of “symbiogenesis” that places cooperation and “co-becoming” at the heart of organic life (73). Wirzba writes: “Human life is always life together with other creatures, large and small,” continuing on to say that “To live a symbiotic life is to understand that our being is always a becoming characterized by receiving and giving, touching and being touched, eating and being eaten, and influencing and being influenced” (76). He suggests that plants are perhaps our best teachers of this, modeling the “fruit-bearing and flowering” benefits of an existence that embraces rootedness over mobility and leans into the essential communal dimensions of interrelated life (76).
Having established the profound entanglement of organic existence, Wirzba next introduces the idea of harmonia mundi, the symphonic “song of life itself” that arises when creation acts in accordance with its unitive purpose (95). He accompanies this with Timothy Ingold’s concept of “meshwork,” an alternative to the network framework that instead insists that “things are their relations. They have no existence, no life, and no meaning apart from the relations that entangle them in a bewildering array of lines of codevelopment” (119). How, then, do these overlapping ideas of symbiogenesis, rootedness, harmonia mundi, and meshwork relate to the crises of the Anthropocene? Wirzba implies that they illuminate the underpinnings of life itself, countering the siren songs of rugged individualism, self-serving competition, and escapism into new planets or inorganic, atomistic techno-bodies that are peddled as the reigning solutions to the dire challenges we face. He writes: “Life alone is a contradiction in terms. Every life moves within a dynamic meshwork world in which an unfathomable number and variety of other lives constantly intersect. To be alive is to be engaged in processes of social and ecological becoming that entangle us within the becoming of others” (177).
In the final section of This Sacred Life, Wirzba arrives at his central premise of articulating the world as God’s sacred creation occupied by creatures like ourselves who are called to contribute to its collective flourishing. He cedes that if this were not true, and we in fact did live within the immanent frame with no transcendent intention in our creation, then all his previous points could be considered happenstance at best and easily ignored in favor of any other individualized perspective of purpose, with the reigning view belonging to capitalism’s mechanistic, utilitarian evaluation (126-127). Wirzba characterizes this as modernity’s worldview, “marked by disenchantment and desacralization, such that things are experienced as fragments and as without lasting value, meaning, or purpose apart from the mastering subject that controls them” (94). To hold to an ethical alternative that affirms a generative intention is, he argues, only possible via a transcendent source who has created the world and imbued it with its sanctity and purpose (158).
Wirzba is cognizant of monotheistic religion’s damning history in regards to matters of ecology and embodiment, citing inclinations towards anti-materialism, dominating postures of subjugation, and otherworldly escapism –– but he asks readers to consider those as aberrations that he hopes to amend (156). He connects the concept of creatio ex nihil to “creatio ex amore,” suggesting that God created the cosmos out of nothing and therefore was motivated not by need but by gracious, creative love (165). The implication, then, is that “Every creature, simply by being the creature that it is, is a material embodiment of a divine intention and energy that rejoices in its flourishing” (166). Ultimately, this is what gives rise to the conviction of life as sacred and the myriad of ethical implications that that carries. Wirzba writes: “If one affirms God as the creator of life, one must also affirm the created beings that God daily nurtures and sustains. One cannot claim to love God if one does not also love what God loves” (154). In other words, God tends to every created being that they graciously manifest, and in doing so grants it the dignity and worth of sanctity through their loving investment.
In this way, we might also think of each experience of life as an expression of divine gifting. This, of course, renders humanity as creatures reliant upon the gifts of God and the nurturing sustenance of the world we belong to, which is a more precarious identity than we often like to claim. Wirzba affirms that “Limit remains at the core of a human being’s existence, and communicates that people are constituted as finite and needy, and will remain so throughout their living. They do not create their own life, nor can they sustain it from out of themselves. Instead, they must constantly look beyond themselves to fellow creatures, the garden itself, and ultimately to [God]” (191). However, he also attests to a generative quality to this life of entangled receptivity, inspiring gratitude, generosity, and hospitality amongst those who can appreciate the gift of their sacred existence. This, ultimately, is the kenotic model of living granted to us by Jesus. Wirzba writes that “Jesus is asking people to reconceive themselves as open vessels that gratefully receive God’s gifts and generously share them with others. They are to reorient themselves in the world as embodied sites through which God’s hospitality with creatures takes place” (206).
Some readers may find fault with This Sacred Life’s hyper-local proposed solutions of to the challenges of the Anthropocene, but Wirzba’s formational emphasis is just as easily considered an asset. He correctly acknowledges that the vast majority of harm is perpetuated by a small number of capitalists, but rather than seeing this as cause for resignation he recognizes the need for a formational overhaul. The logic of neoliberalism has distorted much of our public imagination about who we are, the world we live in and how we are to live within it, to the point where we feel inclined to turn to the same worldviews that caused the problem in hopes that they can help us fix them. Wirzba argues against this, urging the importance of re-enchantment that attends to the sanctity of the world and its interconnected inhabitants as creatures created and continually sustained by God’s loving care. This, he argues, is the counternarrative we need to (re)claim in order to connect with the intended purposes of life that have been woven into the fabric of our entangled existence. The invitation is, quite simply, to begin to live responsively to the gracious gift of life with generative postures of self-giving generosity, tenderness, interrelatedness, and care that are so lacking within our increasingly isolated, individualistic, and competitive contexts. Despite the lingering fear that this may be insufficient, This Sacred Life still reads as a wellspring of hope, compelling readers to remember the sanctity of existence.
September 10, 2024
An impressive ecological theology that guards against deifying the world, yet honors the sanctity of life without ignoring the suffering in the world. Norman Wirzba points the way to a world in which people can once again live in connection with the gift of life and the source of that gift: the Giver of all life. An inspiring theology!
January 22, 2023
This book is incredible and essential. Wirzba’s commitment to a vital, generative, and fleshly Christianity is potently evident in this work. This books demonstrates the importance for Christian’s to live in the world politically, but hardly in the way American bipartisan politics attempts to dictate. Wirzba consistently critiques the contemporary neoliberal economic order and its distortion of nature and humanity’s creative agency in the world. Wirzba preaches an embodied and earthy gospel that illumines the beauty of creation in reorienting and hopeful ways. If you are a Christian who is not afraid to read theological texts that are a little more academic, than I couldn’t recommend this more. Although it is academic, there is still a great accessibility to the text. This book will prove to be a vital resource to me for a long time.
December 13, 2021
At times slow but often brilliant, Wirzba helps us grasp a holistic approach to thinking about about what it means to embrace our creatureliness and create networks, economies and infrastructures that facilitate flourishing for the whole of Creation.
July 13, 2024
Opzich een goede analyse van grote dingen waar het misgaat in ons wereldbeeld en een poging om dat te corrigeren door te focussen op onze relaties met de natuur. We staan niet los als mensen, maar zijn deel van de natuur.
Vandaaruit doet Wirzba ook een poging om normatief te worden. Onze verbondenheid met al het leven is ook een opdracht: leef zodat je dingen tot bloei brengt. Het is een betoog wat echt wel mooi klinkt, maar er blijven hiaten.
Kan je van een gegeven (verbondenheid met wereld) naar een norm? Is zijn visie realistisch? Ik denk dat hij het wel heel rooskleurig invult. Iedereen doet betekenisvol werk en kan daar creativiteit kwijt. Er zijn ook mijnwerkers en schoonmakers nodig. Hier biedt hij geen oplossing.
Prima boek dus, maar het is bij vlagen ook meer een soort leesverslag dan een integratie en eigen doordenking van wat we met al deze ideeën moeten.
Vandaaruit doet Wirzba ook een poging om normatief te worden. Onze verbondenheid met al het leven is ook een opdracht: leef zodat je dingen tot bloei brengt. Het is een betoog wat echt wel mooi klinkt, maar er blijven hiaten.
Kan je van een gegeven (verbondenheid met wereld) naar een norm? Is zijn visie realistisch? Ik denk dat hij het wel heel rooskleurig invult. Iedereen doet betekenisvol werk en kan daar creativiteit kwijt. Er zijn ook mijnwerkers en schoonmakers nodig. Hier biedt hij geen oplossing.
Prima boek dus, maar het is bij vlagen ook meer een soort leesverslag dan een integratie en eigen doordenking van wat we met al deze ideeën moeten.
April 30, 2023
Wandering in a wonderful way. This book offered a moving, theological interpretation of environmental destruction. Along the way it explored topics ranging from surveillance capitalism to the the purpose of education. Although this book is rooted in Christian theology, I think it would be an enriching read for anyone interested in social and environmental justice.
November 10, 2023
By far the best, most encompassing, yet profoundly deep piece of literature I have read. I told my professor that the book made me want to do all things craft and baking instead of studying. I got distracted by sewing pants and baking loaves of bread. She told me Wirzba would be very happy to hear that.
Philosophical, theological and ecological masterpiece.
Philosophical, theological and ecological masterpiece.
March 29, 2023
The content and ideas of this book were very interesting... but the whole book was so wordy. Sometimes topics would be repeated over and over again in different words over the course of multiple pages. If it wasn't for that, I would give it 5 stars.
November 23, 2025
Once in a while, a theological work sparks a complete paradigm shift in you. This book is one of them. Wirzba has offered a gift in its truest sense. Sacred. Beautiful. Stirring. This should be required reading for anyone committing themselves to the work of ministry in the 21st century.
April 25, 2022
3.5 rounded ^^
December 2, 2024
A Wendell Berry for academics, Wirzba is able to feel the pulse of pain and hatred coursing through the modern world and prescribe God’s love as the cure
December 3, 2025
“Learn from nature” read this one for class
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews